a collective dream journal project

Category Archives: mirror

I’m staring at my newly tattooed face in a mirror. Will I regret this? A black vine sneaks up my neck and wraps around the right side of my face, across my forehead, and ends down my left side. I’m ok with it. I like it even. But how did it get there? ♨

I woke up with patches of a milky oily film all over my body. There must be something in this water. There are tiny painless red bumps forming all over my body, some are larger than others. They seem to be gestating under the hazy film. I can’t get it off, the warm water just beads off—I think the milk is weeping out of my pores. This wasn’t here yesterday. Something must be wrong.
Doesn’t matter, I have to get to a funeral. It is for a musician I admire a great deal—his name is Nils Frykdahl. His body is in the trunk of a car and is clothed in a red ritual robe. Friends and fans are paying their respects to him by placing severed fingers on his chest over his heart. I don’t know where the fingers were obtained. Nils begins to shake violently and a wide closed-mouth grin stretches out on his face. Moments later I can see that his teeth are checkered pink and black. He hops out of the trunk and humbly bows before the crowd. People are thankful for the performance.
I see a monolithic-like cube building over the hill behind the funeral car that I have never seen before. In fact, I know it wasn’t there—this is a new building. I decide to explore it. Inside it is full of staircases that seem to go nowhere. Some of the steps are too high for regular-sized people to climb. The cube’s architecture is emotionless and cold. It is much narrower but also taller than it appears from the outside. Glossy black stone square blocks, the size of two people tall, make up the walls. There doesn’t seem to be an end to the height of the building, and as I start walking up one for the spiraling staircases I see that there isn’t a bottom either. There are no windows in the building, and no lights, but somehow I can see. The building is lit by my vision alone. As I climb the stairs my reflection is scattered all over the glossy black walls. I see myself walking in every direction—up, down, backwards, and sideways. I look out at my hand. I don’t have any fingers. I look to my reflections to see if they have any fingers. They don’t. I don’t care. I don’t need them anymore.
Something’s odd—I notice that there is a slight delay to some of my reflections’ movements. I begin spinning franticly around in circles in an attempt to make myself (and them) dizzy. It works. And in the spinning aftermath I am successful in seeing the back of my head, a sight I have never seen before. When the world stops turning I decide I want to leave. But the door is gone. There is no way out of here, at least from where I can see, which is everywhere—through spinning I have mixed up my mind and taken on the vision and perspective of my countless reflections. And through every eye billions more are formed. Overwhelmed, my mind becomes sealed in the glossy black slabs of stone—timeless and frozen in the infinite movements of my ever-expanding body. ♨

I am with a woman, she is dressed up fancy, in a short black skirt and black top. She is sitting to my left in a dimly lit, outdoor cafe. It is night. Before us is a giant glass cylinder that is partitioned once down the center. There are two tubes snaking out of it that have long syringes attached to their ends. A waiter approaches us and asks if we have decided on our dose. My head is foggy. I point to something on the decorative, hard-bound menu, as does the woman. Moments later he begins pouring a bright yellow fluid into my side of the vat, and then a cobalt blue one into my partner’s. He says that one liter each should be sufficient. I’m nervous, she isn’t. We are supposed to stick the syringes into the veins of our hands — I have never had an intravenous drug before. There’s a lot of fluid in that vat. A lot of fluid. But I rationalize that this venue specializes in this experience, so I settle my tension and ask the waiter to stick me with the needle. Another server approaches my partner, and our soft skin is penetrated simultaneously. Their is a slight twinge of pain and then the giant cylinder begins to purr and the fluids on either side begin to merge, forming a spinning rainbowed tornado. I look into the eye of the woman next to me. Her pupil is wide, black and bottomless, and is surrounded by a thin rim of constellated specs of colors, surrounded by a milky haze and endless white. It fills my vision and becomes like a pulsating mandala . . . “a perfect mirror of my own,” and I think my last thought. Slowly, we begin to melt into the rainbow together . . . free from all worry . . . free from death . . . free from life. ♨

I am with Katie, she’s pregnant, we’ve been lying around all day talking. We get up and go into the bathroom. I start combing my hair into various different styles and see in the mirror that I have two large weeds growing out of the edge of my hairline, each about 18 centimeters long. They are weeds, commonly known as camelthorn, which I have seen and uprooted many times before in the desert of New Mexico. I tug upwards on one from its base, and I feel a line of pressure move down my skull into my teeth as I lift it out. About 3 centimeters of rooting below the surface come with it. I then squeeze the tiny hole that has been left, and a thin, solid stream of puss spirals out. It is about 10 centimeters long. I am delighted by this, and Katie and I laugh. I work on the hole more to make sure I got everything, and only a small amount blood comes out. I’m not sure if I will remove the other one or not just yet. ♨

In my dream I’m telling someone about the dream I just had: from a bird’s eye perspective I see a row of houses on an elongated island in a river. I know I’m in Vienna, Austria. I’m smoothly flying or rather gliding by the houses and over the water. I can see that one of the houses is in fact a stage-like building on the water with a huge advertisement for a German electronics supplier. I continue my air glide towards the mountains in front of me, everything looks extremely 3D and feels intense. I suddenly am in a room where everything, floor, ceiling and walls, are made from dark mirroring material. In the middle of the room stands an opulently decorated Christmas tree.

As I’m telling the person all about the dream (the 3D effect and details) and come to the point, “…and in the middle of the room…,” he/she ends the sentence “…stood a Christmas tree.” I’m highly excited that the person has had the same dream, but then someone tells me that they put psychedelic mushrooms in the cookies I had eaten before. I’m extremely disappointing and angry that the wonderful feeling of gliding and the 3D effect didn’t come from deep inside me, and that I didn’t have the precious experience of a shared dream, but that someone just drugged me and injected the pictures. ☆

I’m now in a squatted house in Berlin with a friend. There’s some other people and we are waiting for a concert. There’s several rooms and empty door frames, lots of couches everywhere. We wander around and look for a good place to stand and see the band. But we can’t find the stage. I feel like I’m in a labyrinth. ☆

There’s a lush landscape with a weirdly shaped long basin which doesn’t look natural. Steps go down to where at first there is impressively green grass I can see from above. I’m now in the basin and it’s flooded with grayish water. Pieces of wood and furniture and boats float in the water. ☆

I’m now in a medical practice (perhaps I entered via footbridge from the flooded basin) and lying on a cot. I’m not wearing pants so I guess I’m waiting for a gynecological examination. I don’t like the male doctor from the beginning. As I’m lying there half-naked I can see that he didn’t close the door and people who walk by could see me. I’m angry because my privacy is invaded and the doctor doesn’t care. I want to complain about his behavior and try to find someone in charge. ☆

There’s broken bits of glass everywhere and a lot of it in my pants and underwear. I desperately try to remove them and not cut myself. ☆

(One night later) I’m confined in my grandparent’s house, someone who wants to harm me is inside too, and I freak out smashing the windows, screaming and shouting desperately. There’s broken glass all over the floor again. ☆

I’m a mansion. It’s owned by the family of a high school friend. I find my way into the bathroom. It’s similar to a grimy bathroom in a Vietnamese Bia Hoi. It’s oddly out-of-place in this fancy home, but it feels familiar — I have been here before. I find my reflection in the mirror. I stare into it and make faces, but the face gazing back at me doesn’t follow the facial expressions I know I’m making.

– – –

A man yells, “The gates are open, come on in.” He’s referring to the Enchanted Forest amusement park that I used to go to as a kid. It’s overgrown with weeds. There are people walking around inside and exploring the ruins. All the fairy-tale houses and characters are there, like the witches house in Hansel & Gretel and the Gingerbread Man, and they are all in disrepair. I used to sneak into the park as a teenager through a hole in the fence, it feels odd to be allowed in. ♨